He was careful in his slipping out. It was a terrible art to master, but he had had millennium to learn, to perfect it, for time in the Cage ceased to exist. It was an eternal moment.
The feeble minded would think that thus his time in the cage would have been a blip. An instant. Almost unidentifiable.
But Angels were created outside of time. They did not exist for a blip.
They were unchanged by time, unmoved by it's constant song. As such, they could cut into it, to distant years perfectly rendered in their memory if they had already passed by. Some, granted the powers of the Host, could even cut into a distant future, but this was seldom, for many futures could exist, could over-lap at once. It took an extreme amount of energy to travel there, and even then, one could not be sure that future was true.
Prophets of the Lord were valued for a reason.
The only thing you could count on existing now and then and soon was the Cage.
The Cage existed for infinitude.
There was no break, no escape from it. It was a constant moment. The Birth and Death of Time.
It was excruciating if you thought about it. As the hum of bees would crawl into a human's mind of flesh and drive them mad, so would a lesser Angel have been driven.
A lesser Angel Lucifer was not.
So he learned to ignore it, as one imperfectly ignores an itch in the mind. He learned to use it to his advantage.
He experimented, when he could, slipping out, to Hell, and occasionally with the aid of demons when he'd told them how, Earth.
The secret to slipping through was leaving his Grace behind.
It was always an ordeal. Always a trial.
But for Sam, he could.
He could not slip into other parts of the Cage. It was a strange contraption, perfectly disallowing passage between cells. He could enter Hell, could even, with the aid of a ritual, visit Earth.
But even though he was likely within a mile radius of the human, He could not find Sam.
To Hell, then. But as what? As Satan?
No.
It was too soon for Him, and likely too soon for them, as well.
So he became undone, separate from his Grace, and allowed himself to drift aimlessly until the emptiness of the Cage receded and was replaced with the brash, crude, violent aura of Hell.
He was a whisper, appearing as a flimsy shred of soul. Any lesser and he would be unable to control where he went. Any more and he would attract attention.
He could have chosen to appear all powerful, as he once had, but the denizens of Hell were not likely to speak gladly of Sam. Or attempt to get him out.
And Lucifer needed to know if Sam was alright.
He hadn't really known how he would manage to find out; the Cage was presumably undiscoverable to any one creature in Hell or any dimension other (besides His Father, or perhaps some other, omnipotent being). There was no way He could convince a demon to carry out the spell to make it otherwise without revealing Himself.
But He floated on, outside the drone of the Cage, glad to be away, to think. He wondered if the demons celebrated the capture of Michael. If they were glad Sam had been taken, too, and that his brother was now no doubt broken, having lost what little was left of his family.
But he heard otherwise.
There, amongst not the screams of fresh souls or the ruined cries of the long suffering, but the silence of terror, did he hear it.
If He had not hated demons, He might have been touched by their continued reverence of him.
They did not care about Michael.
But they did care about Sam.
Specifically because Sam was not as unreachable as Lucifer had thought.
Sam had been resurrected.
By Crowely.
Lucifer fought conflicting emotions.
Sam was alive. And currently unmolested by the Cage. He was free of any warping to his soul, that he could breath and live and keep his brother, no matter how insufferable Dean was to Lucifer, his own love of Sam made it so.
Because of Crowely.
Every basest instinct within Him raged at that. That Crowely dare. That any demon dare. Sam Winchester was His, and His alone.
Let no one other raise him but his blundering and loving brother.
Lucifer was relieved beyond words, of any language, ancient or new, Enochian or flawed.
He was incandescent beyond thought, beyond conception, beyond simple, mindless fury.
No, a primordial fury.
The new King of Hell would be extinguished by it's Prince.
His Wrath had no bounds, even the Cage could not contain His rage.
But Sam was alive.
Sam was out of the Cage.
Sam was Free.
